


An Unfortunate Wedding

by JulisCaesar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Tumblr Prompt, Unresolved Romantic Tension, mentions of others but they don't really star
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-06-02 20:26:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19448911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulisCaesar/pseuds/JulisCaesar
Summary: Draco is absolutely, completely, entirely certain that he’s going to end up somewhere on page 3 tomorrow.





	An Unfortunate Wedding

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Miserable wedding guests, anyone from either Gallifrey or HP.

Draco is absolutely, completely, entirely certain that he’s going to end up somewhere on page 3 tomorrow.

Why? Well for one, he’s in his most expensive, most formal robes, which are pure silk from hideously rare species in the Americas or wherever, and this means that the instant they get wet they cling to his skin like flower petals–just as annoying, just as slippery, and _much_ more likely to result in a sad, disapproving lecture from his mother.

Normally Draco isn’t anything near so naff as to wear _silk_ to an _outdoor wedding_ , but in his defense he was told it would be taking place in Longbottom’s gorgeous greenhouses, safely rain-free. And that was the plan, right up until Potter and his sorry crew arrived, took Groom #1 to relax (according to Weasley) or at least stay out of the way (according to Granger, who he thought had the right of it), chose to do this by way of Quidditch, and long story very short (wasn’t Longbottom afraid of Quidditch? along with everything else?), someone put a Quaffle through a wall of the greenhouse, which disrupted the charms enough (something about morphic resonance, he didn’t know, it wasn’t his greenhouse) to make the ceiling fall in, and the wedding was hastily rescheduled for the front lawn.

At which point Madam Longbottom collected the younger Longbottom, Potter and company attempted to disappear (barring Lovegood, who was, horrifyingly, _in_ the greenhouse, doing something with the plants), and Blaise, the only reason Draco was here at this miserable excuse for a high society occasion and not, say, literally anywhere else, found Draco just as the skies opened up.

“You owe me,” Draco had snarled, visions of the metaphorical galleons draped over his body melting away before his eyes.

Blaise had just handed him, out of thin air, a glass of champagne. “No, this is me collecting, remember? After that incident in sixth year.”

He hadn’t been stupid enough to ask which incident. Sixth year contained a multitude of incidents, each of which Blaise had, graciously, tolerated in the moment and logged in order to get retribution for in the future. (Blaise was one of the few to think they were going to _have_ a future.) Instead he had drained the glass, his mother’s imaginary voice switching lectures from the-care-and-keeping-of-centuries-old-robes-that-cost-as-much-as-a-small-mansion to the-correct-way-to-drink-a-glass-of-equally-old-champagne-which-you-have-just-been-handed-by-the-groom, and put a tiny shield over his head.

This had served him well enough until the ceremony began and guests were asked to put their wands away to avoid any sort of unfortunate mishaps. In an _acutely_ embarrassing moment, during which Draco attempted to blend in with the scenery, or at least with the other guests, and failed miserably, Madam Longbottom revealed that the reason the ceremony was still, despite the weather (now attempting to drown Draco out of what he assumed was mercy) outdoors was that Longbottom Manor, since the end of the last-war-but-one, had protections put into it against Death Eaters.

In short, or as short as Draco ever got (not very, according to every Hogwarts professor, both parents, at least six of the other Slytherins in his year, every prefect he had ever known, and no fewer than four wizarding attorneys), he was outside on a very wet June afternoon, watching a close friend get married to a…something.

Apparently Blaise and Longbottom had bonded over plants during the replacement year. Draco wouldn’t know.

Now they were bonding over something else, and Draco is sitting in the front row as one of Blaise’s groomsmen (Blaise’s best man was Theodore, in what was going to be a vain attempt to keep the society papers from writing about the revival meeting of the Death Eaters) as the rain attempts to dissolve the silk, rather than just plaster it to his skin.

And of course, at the end of the opposite row, in the matching position for Longbottom (whose best man was Finnigan; Longbottom had no need to worry about the papers coming up with unfortunate adolescent associations with illegal paramilitary organizations), is Harry fucking Potter, whose passé wool robes would have been _dreadful_ if the weather had been as anticipated (i.e. sunny, clear, warm enough to make Draco consider whether short sleeves were really as risqué as all that) and are instead looking very warm and no doubt smelling strongly of sheep.

Harry Potter and his smelly sheep robes. And his jawline.

Draco stares fixedly at Blaise, who is looking into Longbottom’s eyes with an expression Draco has only ever seen on infatuated girls. It is hideously embarrassing, which no doubt means that the public will adore it; part fourteen of the Slytherin Rehabilitation Project a success. Longbottom, who he should probably start thinking of by his first name, but it’s so hard to adjust after ten years of mild-to-moderate antagonism and one year of outright war, is looking back in the same way Longbottom always does, i.e. like a struck bull. Since this _is_ a wedding and Blaise only threatened him once, Draco will be gracious and assume this is because Longbottom is always in love with something in his line of sight.

Four feet–or is it five–away, Potter makes a quiet sigh.

The society pages love Potter even more than they hate Draco, a fact which Draco is unabashedly glad for at least once a week, which does mean that Draco knows that Potter and the youngest Weasley broke up four months ago following the youngest Weasley’s transfer to the Holyhead Harpies and immediate subsequent discovery of the joys of lesbian sex (this factoid occupied three paragraphs and a photo caption); from his other main source of news (Blaise, who got it from Longbottom who no doubt got it directly from a Weasley), he knows that the sexual rediscovery was mutual and the pair still go out for drinks regularly.

Draco stares _harder_ at Blaise in the vain hope that his friend’s newly married ass will distract him from Potter’s hair (is it gelled like that or is he just obscenely lucky in hair as he is in everything else?). It fails.

The ceremony ends, there is a kiss (Draco is _not thinking about it_ ), and they move across the drive to the reception, where some _immensely_ clever person has erected an awning and charmed it waterproof (why couldn’t they have done this for the ceremony?), so Draco forgoes the drinks table in favor of standing under the awning and dripping.

“D'you want me to get you a towel?” someone says from behind his shoulder, and Draco makes a noise he will never admit to later and jumps approximately three feet in the air.

It’s Potter. Of course it is.

“No,” Draco says, straightening up in a way that makes his robes cling wetly to his back. “I will not dry myself off like some rustic.”

Potter looks mildly irritated, i.e. one corner of his mouth draws in and the other twists up, and then one eyebrow jerks slightly, and all that does is accentuate how browned he’s gotten since Hogwarts and how much his face has filled out. “So you’d rather be wet then?”

He would. Draco scowls.

Potter upgrades from mild irritation to exasperation. “Look, I thought this would be, you know, a chance to move past things. Celebrating the healing wounds in our culture. That sort of thing.”

Draco doesn’t even have to think about this. “Did Granger feed you that one?”

Potter crosses his arms, which gives Draco the chance to wonder when he changed from this skinny little stripling to someone with a chest like that. “She’s _right_.”

“She’s running for Minister and it behooves her to say things that encourage the public to look past the blood issue,” Draco says, largely to show off that he’s not _entirely_ isolated, and partially because it makes Granger look infinitesimally less Gryffindor and maybe therefore will irk Potter.

Annoyingly, Potter just blinks at him. “She’s not–what? Hermione’s not running for anything, she’s happy at the Dimly. And did you just say _behooves_? In normal conversation?”

Dimly is Ministry slang for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and Granger is about four days from ceremonially sacrificing the DMLE head in an effort to get better creatures laws. She’s still naive enough to think that being Minister will help with this (it won’t) but smart enough to run almost entirely on her reputation as a war hero. Heroine. “ _Some_ people received a literary education,” Draco says snidely, even though he’d hated every reading assignment from his parents.

“Oh, well that explains a lot about you,” Potter says immediately. “Anyway, you’re making me cold just to look at you, could I at least get you a spare robe?”

“They wouldn’t _match_!” Draco says, genuinely horrified. If he’s going to be in page 3, he’d _much_ rather it was for his entry into an impromptu wet robe contest and not because it looked like he went bin diving in Knockturn Alley.

“…Right,” says Potter. “Well. I’ve done my duty then.” And then, without so much as a by-your-leave, he marches off, robes showing exactly how much of his shoulders are muscle (all of them), and leaving Draco feeling like that could have gone rather better.


End file.
